And Then He Kissed Her

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  “I think now I’d have to stop undressing you for a bit and just touch you.” He touched his hand to the nape of her neck, and she jumped as if shocked by a jolt of electricity. “I’d run my hands over your shoulders and down your bare arms,” he told her, feeling lust overtaking him with each word. “I’d touch your breasts, your belly, your hips, through your chemise and drawers—”

  She made an inarticulate sound of shock.

  “Is that what you have on?” Harry brushed the side of her neck with his lips. “Or a combination, perhaps? I’ve imagined stripping you out of both, of course, but which do you usually wear?”

  She didn’t answer, and he nipped the taut ten-dons of her neck, feeling her shiver in response. “Emma, Emma, tell me,” he coaxed against her skin, “so I can imagine it when I’m not with you. A chemise and drawers?”

  She didn’t move.

  “A combination, then?”

  Her stiff little nod confirmed that, and he continued, “I’d leave that on for now.”

  “You would?” The moment the words were out of her mouth, she bit her lip, still not looking at him.

  “I have to,” he explained. “I can’t get you out of it without taking off your shoes first.”

  “Oh.” It was a hushed sound.

  “Since you’ve got on a pair of plain walking shoes today, and not those ugly, high-button things you usually wear—”

  She interrupted with a sound of indignation. “I don’t wear ugly shoes!”

  Since most of her shoes were hideous, he ignored that bit of nonsense. “Just now, I’m fully occupied with the luscious task of removing your garters, so we won’t argue the point, but I’m going to buy you some pretty shoes, Miss Dove, at the first opportunity. Dozens of ’em, frivolous, frippery little slippers of velvet and brocade. Now, don’t interrupt again, if you please. Interrupting is rude, you know. So, now that I’ve got your shoes off, I have to remove your stockings—”

  It was not Emma who interrupted, but the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Harry groaned and pulled back, and the moment he did, Emma scooted sideways, as far from him as she could get without abandoning the settee altogether. Another hopeful sign. He drew several deep breaths, forcing down his arousal.

  Mrs. Morris entered the room with the tea tray. A maid in print dress and cap followed with a second tray, this one laden with food.

  “Put it there, Dorcas,” the landlady ordered as she set her tray on the tea table opposite the settee and took one of the chintz chairs that flanked it. The maid deposited the tray of sandwiches and cakes on the table in front of Emma and Harry, gave a curtsy, and departed.

  “I say,” Harry said, leaning forward and trying to look properly grateful for food when he was ravaged with lust, “this is the prettiest tea I’ve seen in ages. And on the spur of the moment, too. Your tenants are so fortunate to have you.”

  Mrs. Morris simpered as she began to pour the tea. “Not all my tenants eat in, my lord, but for those who do, I flatter myself that I set a good table with proper food.”

  He glanced at Emma, but she was looking away, paying no attention to either of them. The blush had receded from her complexion, leaving her skin once again as pale as milk. “Does Miss Dove eat in?” he asked, returning his attention to the woman opposite.

  “She didn’t too often, sir, when she worked for you. She had some late hours, then, she did. But now that she is the secretary to that wonderful Mrs. Bartleby, typing up her manuscripts for her, well, she eats most all her meals in.”

  Harry leaned forward and reached for a seed-cake from the tray on the table and ate it as he tried to think of some excuse, any excuse, to get the woman out of the room.

  “Sugar?” Mrs. Morris asked as she poured him a cup of tea. “Milk?”

  “Neither, thank you, but perhaps…” He paused, frowning a little, scanning the tea tray as if searching for something.

  “Yes, my lord?” The landlady leaned forward in her chair, terribly eager to please. “Was there something else you wanted?”

  Harry gave her a deprecating little smile. “No, no, I don’t wish you to go to any further trouble on my account.”

  “It would be no trouble,” she assured him. “No trouble at all.”

  “I was hoping you might, perhaps, have some lemon?”

  “Lemon?” She glanced at the tray, then back at him, giving an awkward laugh. “Why, how silly of Hoskins not to have provided it! I shall bring it at once.”

  “How kind you are.” He gave her his very best smile. “And so thoughtful.”

  Beside him, Emma made a sound of exasperation.

  Mrs. Morris didn’t seem to notice. She fluttered like a debutante, fingers lightly touching her hair as she stood up. “I shall return in a moment,” she said, and left the room, once again leaving them alone.

  Harry slid to Emma’s side of the settee. “Now, where were we?”

  “She hasn’t any lemons, or she’d have brought them out along with the tea. Now she’ll have to send Hoskins to the costermonger on the corner.”

  “I hope she goes herself. It’ll give me more time to get you naked.” He silenced her protest with a kiss. “I believe I was removing your stockings. Since your legs are so long and lovely, I’d have to take heaps of time over this part. I’d slide them down one at a time, slowly, so very slowly. I’d pull them off your pretty feet, then I’d caress your ankles and your calves and the backs of your knees. God, how I’d love to caress the backs of your knees.” Imagining it, he felt the thick heaviness of lust overtaking his body, and he knew he couldn’t endure much more of this. He opened his eyes.

  She was staring at him, her eyes round as saucers, her lips parted.

  He decided he could endure a little more. He tilted his head to kiss the velvety skin of her ear. “I think it’s time for me to take off that combination of yours,” he murmured. “I want to see your breasts.”

  She made a squeak of protest. “You couldn’t see my—” She stopped, then tried again to speak. “It would be dark!”

  “Make love to you in the dark? That would be a sin, Emma. No, I’d have to have light so that I could see you.” His words, whispered against her ear, were making her shiver. “So I could look at you while I touched you, so I could see my hands on you.”

  Tortuous as it was, his strategy was working, for he could hear her breath coming in quick little huffs. His own breathing was none too steady, either. “I’ve imagined your breasts in my mind a hundred times, Emma.” He closed his eyes again, punctuating his words with kisses, his body on fire. “A thousand times.” His voice cracked, and he could feel his control slipping irretrievably away.

  He strove to retain it just a little longer. “I’d caress your breasts over and over, kiss them.” He drew her earlobe into his mouth, scored her skin ever so lightly with his teeth. “Suckle them.”

  She inhaled a deep, shuddering gasp, shoved aside his hand before he could stop her, and bolted. But she didn’t run for the door. Instead, she went to the window, flung up the sash, and began taking deep breaths of the sultry evening air.

  He moved to rise and follow her, but just then he could hear Mrs. Morris’s footsteps coming up the stairs for the second time. Damn, he’d forgotten all about the woman. He sank back down, his body in agony. Quick as lightning, he unbuttoned his jacket, jerked it off, draped in the most casual manner possible over his hips. He was just reaching for a bite of food from the tray as Mrs. Morris reentered the room.

  “Here we are,” she said brightly. “My apologies, your lordship, but it took my cook forever to find the lemons. In the very back of the larder, they were.”

  Her gaze skimmed past Harry, who was eating a cucumber sandwich and trying desperately to appear complacent, to where Emma was standing by the window, sucking in great gulps of air and cooling herself rapidly with the fan. “Emma, are you unwell?” she asked with a frown of concern.

  “I’m perfectly well,” Emma said in a strangled voice, fanning faster.
“It’s just…it’s just so hot in this room.”

  “It is warm,” the landlady agreed as she sat back down. “Quite sensible of you to open the window, dear.” She set the plate of lemon wedges on the tray and looked at Harry, smiling. “Emma is always sensible. Such a sweet, steady young woman. Her Aunt Lydia was a dear friend of mine….”

  He’d wager Emma wasn’t feeling either sweet or steady at the present moment. As for himself, Harry knew he was an unholy mess. Arousal was coursing through every cell of his body, his heart was thudding in his chest like a runaway train, and he was painfully aware—for the second time this evening—of having a full erection and no relief in sight.

  He watched Mrs. Morris pour him a cup of tea, but for the life of him, he could not manage any more of the polite, inane conversation required.

  “Mrs. Morris, forgive me,” he interrupted her praises of that dear, departed paragon, Aunt Lydia, and glanced at Emma, who was still standing by the window, fanning herself. “I fear that Miss Dove is quite overheated. I can hardly think tea—being a hot beverage, you understand—is quite the thing for her. Perhaps a glass of water?”

  “I don’t need a glass of water,” Emma said from the other side of the room.

  “You do look a bit piqued, dear,” Mrs. Morris said. “Perhaps water would be a good idea.”

  Harry gave an emphatic nod, and when the landlady walked to the door, he followed her. They paused in the doorway, Harry leaning close to whisper a few words. Her mouth opened in stupefaction, but she did as he bade, going out and closing the door behind her.

  Emma frowned as Harry came to her side. She glanced past him to the closed door, then back to him again. “What did you say to her?” she demanded.

  “I’m not a patient man, Emma, and any patience I do have is utterly gone. I told her I wanted a moment alone with you, and asked her to give us some privacy.”

  Emma groaned and put her face in her hands. “There’s only one honorable reason an unmarried man asks to speak with an unmarried woman alone, and that’s to propose,” she mumbled. Lifting her head, she scowled at him. “And we both know,” she added in a fierce whisper, “that any proposal made by you would be a thoroughly dishonorable one.”

  “We don’t have much time.” He pulled her into his arms and played his last card. “Take me upstairs to your rooms,” he said, and began pressing kisses to her face. “Let’s make love and end this torture.”

  “We can’t!” she moaned. “Mrs. Morris would see. She would know.”

  “I’ll send her on an errand. I’ll climb your fire escape.” He was running out of options; arousal and desperation were clawing at him. “I’ll pay her to stay silent.”

  He knew those words were a mistake the moment they were out of his mouth.

  “Money buys anything, does it?” She jerked out of his embrace. “Mrs. Morris is a kind, thoroughly respectable woman. She wouldn’t take your money. She wouldn’t give a wink and a nod, and look the other way. And even if she did, it wouldn’t matter. I should still have to see her afterward.”

  “What of it? You wouldn’t have a scarlet letter branded on your chest, if that’s what you’re afraid of!”

  “Don’t you understand? She was a friend of my aunt. She knows me. I would have to face her every day, and she and I would both know I was…w-w-was—” Her voice wobbled a little. “That I was unchaste.”

  “For God’s sake, Emma, she isn’t your friend. She was your aunt’s friend. And you wouldn’t have to face her if you didn’t wish to. You can move. I’ll get you a new flat. Better yet, I’ll get you a house.”

  “Like Juliette Bordeaux?” She looked at him, her gaze becoming scornful. “Shall I get a topaz and diamond necklace, too, a few months from now, purchased by your secretary, along with a note of farewell delivered by your footman?”

  He felt as if he’d been slapped. “It isn’t the same thing.”

  “Isn’t it? What makes it different?” She folded her arms. “I am not a cancan dancer in a music hall. I deserve to be courted in honorable fashion or not at all!”

  He should have known this was coming. “You want me to marry you, is that it?”

  She looked so appalled, he would have been insulted if he weren’t so relieved.

  “Marry you?” she cried. “Heavens, no!” Her gaze raked over him with a disapproval worthy of her sainted aunt. “No woman with sense would marry you. You’re the poorest prospect for matrimony I’ve ever met.”

  “Quite so. I’m glad we’ve got that straight.”

  “And, damn it all, Harry, I don’t wish to marry anyway. Why should I? I’ve quite a successful career. I’m Mrs. Bartleby.”

  “You’re not Mrs. Bartleby,” he shot back before he could stop himself. “Your Aunt Lydia is Mrs. Bartleby.”

  “That’s not true! The ideas I put in my articles are mine.”

  “Some of the ideas are yours, I grant you, like that origami business and the napkin rings, but the voice isn’t you. I’ve published enough writing in my life to know! You’re not Mrs. Bartleby, fussing about rules like some middle-aged matron.” He threw some of her own writings in her face to prove his point. “You don’t really believe girls shouldn’t eat any part of the chicken but the wing. You don’t really believe girls shouldn’t eat quail or cheese and that they should only select the plainest dishes on the menu.”

  “Rules of conduct are important, for young ladies especially!”

  “Not if the rules are silly, and making poor girls starve themselves on wings of chicken and plain pudding is silly! It defies common sense. Being a sensible person, Emma, you know that as well as I do. Why do you write about rules you don’t really believe in?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and he saw his chances of getting her into bed diminishing, but he was so frustrated, he almost didn’t care. “You’re not Mrs. Bartleby. You’re not Aunt Lydia. You’re Emma.” He grabbed her shoulders and gave her a little shake, wishing he could shake some sense into her stubborn brain. “You swear and you read naughty books. You’re passionate and warm and the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted. And I don’t think you really believe I was wrong to divorce my wife, and I don’t think you disapprove of me nearly as much as you think you ought. If you did, you would never have agreed to come back and write for me. And I know damn well you don’t believe kissing me is wrong.”

  “If two people are not married nor engaged to be married, it is wrong! It is!” She tried to jerk free, but he wouldn’t let her go.

  “Why? Because of what you’ve been told, but it’s not what you feel. And I’ve known that since the day I kissed you in that bookshop, because I saw your face afterward. God, Emma, it was radiant, your face, all lit up from the inside like sunshine. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And to night you didn’t believe it was wrong when I touched you, or you would have stopped me. When I said those things earlier, you could have told me to leave. You could have slapped my face. You could have dressed me down in spades, but you didn’t. You wanted me to say those things. You wanted to hear them. You did, Emma, you know you did.”

  “It was wrong of me to listen to any of this.” She clamped her hands over her ears. “But I won’t listen anymore.”

  “You will, by God.” He grasped her wrists, pulled them down, held them in a hard grip. “The woman I kissed in that bookshop and in my office wasn’t thinking about proprieties. She was just feeling it, taking it in like oxygen. That woman kissed me the way every woman ought to kiss a man.”

  “You’ve kissed enough women to know.”

  He ignored that. “Why can’t you be honest about what you really think and how you really feel? Where is Emma? What happened to her? What happened to the little girl who liked rolling in the mud and singing off-key?”

  Her face twisted, and she made a choked sound like a sob.

  He knew he was hurting her, but he was driven to say these things, for he was at the end of his tether. “I’ll tell you what happened to her. She’s be
en stifled and smothered by people and their opinions her entire life.”

  “Who are you to criticize my family? You never met any of them, you don’t know anything about them!”

  “I know all I care to know, thank you. But they didn’t succeed in snuffing Emma out completely, did they? There are times when she breaks through, and when she does, Lord, she’s so lovely she makes me ache with wanting her.”

  She sagged and all the fight went out of her. “Go away,” she said. “Please, just go away.”

  “You’ve called me insincere, Emma, but it’s you who lies. You lie to yourself. You push aside what you want to do in favor of what you should do. You ignore what you really think in favor of what you ought to think. You are dishonest in your own heart, and that’s the worst dishonesty there is. You’re so damned concerned about being a lady. Why can’t you just allow yourself to be a woman?”

  He freed her hands, but before she could turn away, he cupped her face in one hand, wrapped an arm around her waist, and kissed her.

  She didn’t respond, but stood limp in his embrace, not fighting, but not responding either. That did something to him, cracked him right through the center, and he felt himself coming apart. He kissed her harder, inflamed by lust and anger and complete frustration.

  A tear rolled over his fingers. It burned like acid.

  “Christ!” He shoved her back and let go of her, violence roiling within him. For weeks, he’d been panting over her like a puling adolescent, and for what? So that she could make him feel like a beggar or a brute? He had to get quit of her. Now. For good and all.

  He raked his hands through his hair, straightened his clothes, tried to speak in a civilized fashion when he wanted to break something. “I won’t touch you again,” he said, crossing to the settee to retrieve his coat. “Ever. We’ll put the wall of propriety back up between us and resume being indifferent acquaintances.” Even as he said it, he knew what a joke that notion was. He took a deep breath.

  “On second thought,” he amended, “I think it would be best if we don’t meet in person about your work anymore. We’ll go back to conducting our discussions through written correspondence and couriers.”